01.08.08

Sander Marechal has just announced a project which is very important to OpenDocument format. It is the ODF-XSLT Project.

Lone Wolves is happy to announce the ODF-XSLT project. The ODF-XSLT Document Generator is a library written in PHP 5 that brings the full power of XSLT to your OpenDocument files. It enables you to use ODF files as if they were plain XSLT templates. It also includes a few extra parsing options that allow you to edit the XSLT parts of these ODF from within your favourite office suite. ODF-XSLT is developed by Tribal Internet Marketing and is released by Lone Wolves as Free Software under the GNU General Public License, version 3.

The first release of ODF-XSLT is odf-xslt-0.4 and can be downloaded from our download section, together with a nightly snapshot of the subversion trunk. You can also check out the latest version directly from our subversion repository. The manual and API documentation are available from the project website.

“[...] current PC technology is totally sufficient for most office tasks and consumers desires and [...] any performance bottleneck is not in today’s PC’s but in today’s COM pipes. This in itself might slow down replacement cycles and life time shortening until we find true MIPS eating applications – a priority not only Intel should subscribe to.”

The renovation has been paid for by the government and Intel, with the chip firm covering the majority of the costs of the technology.

As you can see, Intel has resorted to dumping techniques in its fight not only against AMD but also against a charity. It is suppression and a stranglehold using the depth of one’s pocket. A source was identified which claims that Eee PC may serve a role in this plot as well.

Just to refresh your memory, Microsoft has meanwhile been using bribes in order to fight something which is hard to combat without incentives. It tried to defeat Free software (Mandriva Linux in this case) and it has similar plans in Russia where Intel is assisting Microsoft in the fight against transition to GNU/Linux in all schools (localised Mandriva derivative called ALT Linux).

Do remember that this is not even a case of giving something for free. In this case, Intel loses money just to crush the competition, which is illegal (economists would name it “dumping”). This has been yet another demonstration of monopoly abuse.

You will find more information in the following items (and the items cited therein):

There are some valuable references in the items above, so they do not need to be repeated or explained further. They are necessary for context however.

The story about Intel’s (and Microsoft’s) sabotage of the OLPC is a disgrace, but what’s most disturbing is the the media's fear of proper coverage. Groklaw will give you a good idea of what really happened. There are other issues that Intel is yet to face for its abuses, e.g.:

“…it can be seen as a myth and a damaging stereotype which makes Free software users and supporters seem like a sinister conspiracy.”It was several days ago that we mentioned the fact that there is no “the community” in Free software. We cited a nice short article that addresses this issue. The ‘community’ does not exist. It’s merely an attempt to portray Free software as “communism” or a dangerous clique which is always scheming to take over the industry, wreaking chaos in the process. In other other words, it can be seen as a myth and a damaging stereotype which makes Free software users and supporters seem like a sinister conspiracy. It’s a demonisation tool, also.

The Linux Foundation has just announced a new series of audiocasts which makes its debut with a Linus Torvalds interview. The 451 Group has already dived into this first audio and it makes the observation that even Linus agrees with the above. “There is no open source community”, argues Torvalds. Here is a fragment from this excellent analysis:

How can software vendors engage with the open source community? An important step, according to Linus Torvalds, is to stop believing such a thing really exists and start engaging in the development process.

This specific issue is worth emphasising particularly because many times in the past Jeff Waugh tries to wave the “community” wand and claim that we do not serve “the community”. A few of this site’s readers, as well as ourselves, took offense in Jeff’s remark and the especially use of the word “community”, which was seen as out of place.

While on this subject of “community” smears and myths, we wish to present a set of very relevant articles which show how stereotypes get used against Free software. It’s easy to discredit that whom you successfully demonise.

Given how the technology and methods the Linux community uses are constantly villified, ridiculed, and held in contempt by competitors; by ill-informed IT professionals and hobbyists; and now by journalists who use lies and outrageous comments to hold the community’s response up for ridicule–is it any wonder why the community is so defensive in their responses?

That’s not a justification of bad behavior, but it certainly puts such responses in another light.

The problem here is that the powers that be have created enough FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) about Linux that most decision makers feel it is safer to stick with Windows (including XP). That FUD is fueled by many myths and misconceptions about what Linux can and cannot do.

Naysayers position open source as a sort of geeky pleasure that’s best reserved only for unwedded twenty- and thirty-something males residing in basements owned by parental figures. That the Linux platform is the product of a wide network of hobbyists. That the solutions which subsist within the Linux system are not worth equal attention to big-name products from firms like Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, and others.

“Back then, to base a business on products built using Linux and open source was a fairly new idea. We were out in the market for fundraising and venture capital, but the investors we talked to were very averse to the idea that with open source that you would not own your intellectual property. Our employees got the idea, and the customers loved it, but the investing community seemed allergic to open source. We were forced to bootstrap for two or three years until we could show traction.”

What if Linux and Free and Open Source Software became illegal to use due to “national security?” Never mind the fact that the American military uses it. Never mind the fact that Microsoft funded both political parties in the year 2000. Never mind that Richard Stallman has accused Microsoft of enabling terrorism in the first place.

The sheer ignorance regarding casual Linux users astounds me to no end. While I’m not interested in pointing fingers, there is a lot of misinformation about the Linux community, and we will help to dispel some of these myths, once and for all.

1. Linux Users Are Cheap. Ah, this is one of my favorites. It seems that Linux users have long since been seen as cheap, despite the fact that so many of them in the States earn up to six figures. First, define cheap? Are we cheap because we choose not to buy brand new everything with every release of our selected OS?

After a long and arduous journey that included a suspended validation last year [...] OpenSSL has regained its FIPS 140-2 validation

“We called it the FUD campaign,” he says. “There were all kinds of complaints sent to the CMVP including one about ‘Commie code.’ [...] Silly or no, each complaint that’s filed really slows down the process.”

“…the ones they did see often contained redacted, or blacked-out, data about who had filed the complaint .. in some cases, proprietary software vendors were lodging the complaints.

What is it about Ubuntu Linux that makes otherwise competent technical writers switch to Moron Mode? Everywhere I turn, I see articles on how to do obvious things in Ubuntu. Books on Ubuntu concentrate on listing every insignificant detail of every obvious procedure; things that are inherently self-explanatory are explained in depth. Subjects that have any inkling of technical complexity are skipped because, “Whoa — those are way too hard for you stupid Ubuntu users to grasp, so let’s just skip them and pretend everything’s peachy.”

Repeated efforts at Nationwide Mutual Insurance to try Linux on the mainframe faced internal opposition, some of it from IT employees worried that a mainframe-based server consolidation would be a threat to their jobs. They “fought tooth and nail to keep it from happening,” said James Vincent, a mainframe systems engineering consultant at Nationwide.

Their resistance taught Vincent a lesson that he put to use after the Linux project was finally approved in 2005. Part of Vincent’s job involved working with the employees who had feared the project, including IT staffers who worked on Unix systems.

Because proprietary companies will always spend more of their money on marketing than open source outfits, it pops up regularly in the best of places, such as at Time Magazine recently. Or Microsoft sends CEO Steve Ballmer to London, so he can rant about how his lawyers are going to make all Linux users pay Microsoft for their stuff.

It’s nonsense.

This is not “the gift economy,” as Justin Fox calls it in Time. This is people taking advantage of the fact that the Internet has no distribution costs, which means marketing costs can also sink to zero. No ads in Time doesn’t make you a communist.

I can understand that a teenage, underprivileged geek reacts like that, but not mature people who are blessed with the gift of words and the privilege of a good education. Regular visitors of my blog know that nothing outrages me more than people who apply these guerrilla tactics. Whether it is Ian Ferguson who said that “the flaming Linux bigots should take a backseat”, Mohit Joshi, who equaled GNU to communism or the more recently Bruce Byfield, who obviously couldn’t take the heat anymore and decided to proclaim unilaterally that all bloggers who don’t agree with him are automatically “conspiracy theorists”.

I found this comment while I was browsing through an MS-Windows oriented site where a blogger said something nasty about Microsoft. It isn’t even worth to refer to the link, because it has nothing to do with this story. It’s about the name-calling these Microsoft fans do. I heard ‘zealots’, ‘bigots’, ‘advocates’, the whole lot. Words I never knew before, because English is not my native tongue. I don’t mind to be called a fanboy, because that is what I am. What may be not too clear to these Microsoft zealots is why I am a fanboy. It’s not because I really dig this “free the software, free the world” ideology. That came much later. It’s because I like this “gimme the source” idea.

[...]

As a matter of fact, I think that Microsoft itself has created the “Linux fanboys” they are complaining about, just like all the legal trouble they have found themselves in the last few decades. In Dutch there is a saying “wie goed doet, goed ontmoet”, which means that all good things come to those who make them happen. I think the reverse is true as well. So next time you call me a “Linux fanboy”, remember why I became one. To all those “Windows fanboys” I’d like to say, I’ve become a Linux fanboy because I have used Linux for a long time. Have you? I know first hand what MS-Windows is all about..

These references will hopefully prove valuable for one purpose or another. █

Note that the number of claims issued per year has almost quintupled in those 30 years, from under 700,000 claims per year to over 3 million for the last several years. That’s amazing. And people wonder why the PTO is passing rules attempting to limit continuations and the number of claims per application.

If you wish to know what’s involved in obtaining a patent, see this example from yesterday.

Yong Guan had scribbled 12 arrows across his office whiteboard, each black line going from one little box he had drawn to another little box. He had written five long formulas up there, too.

And that was bad news for cyber criminals.

This is likely to result in software (algorithm), which corresponds to graph theory, i.e. mathematics. Are we truly at a stage where people can own and charge for the use of applied mathematics? What would Newton say? █

Open standards. Our helpers are right at home in this discussion. Standards are inherently political. The idea of widely adopted open standards is nirvana. Ever since Computer Associates, HP, DEC and Amdahl all challenged IBM’s proprietary standards in the dark ages, and with the advent of Windows on PCs, standards have been set by the market. Volume adoption is equal to a standard. The problem with this approach is the huge tax in the form of higher prices when a vendor-provided industry standard monopolizes the market.

There are no true altruists in the standards game.

Every urge government has is to extract the setting of standards from the market and establish them for the common good, as monopolies are inherently anticompetitive. The problem is that in fast-changing, evolving spaces – like IT – bureaucratic or communal attempts at setting standards are hopelessly slow.

Adding an older quote to this, Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776):

“I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

This was found among the quotes in the Billwatch quotes archive, which adds: “When read in combination with Microsoft’s repeated claims that they are working for the good of society, not for that of their shareholders, this quote of Mr. Smith is refreshing.”